“We’re here to celebrate Carlos,” said his friend and colleague Victor Landa in opening the event. “We’re launching him into our memories, our hearts and our minds.”

Beyond the amusing stories, Guerra was remembered Saturday night as a writer, orator and activist who took principled stands and never wavered in his beliefs.

“He stood for the well-being of others, particularly the poor. He fought discrimination in South Texas, the fierce discrimination that existed at that time,” said Mario Compean, like Guerra, a former leader of the La Raza Unida Party.

“All of us of that generation had the passion, but Carlos was also a gifted speaker in articulating the agenda of the Chicano movement,” Compean said.

Throughout the evening, there were hints of the dramatic political changes in which Guerra played a critical role.

Looking back, his life coincided with the political empowerment of Hispanics, and particularly Mexican Americans.

Guerra was born in an era in which Mexican Americans in South Texas often were segregated in schools and cemeteries, kept from public office by the poll tax and gerrymandering, and blocked from serving on juries.

In 1947, the year of his birth, a federal court in Los Angeles took the radical step of declaring the segregation of “Mexican and Latin descent” children in California schools illegal.

A year later, the American GI Forum was formed in Corpus Christi to fight for the rights of Hispanic war veterans. Soon after that, the family of deceased veteran Felix Longoria was turned away from a funeral home in Three Rivers.

And Guerra, who fought on the front lines of the civil rights struggle, lived to see a Mexican American from San Antonio become U.S. attorney general, and a woman of Puerto Rican descent serve on the Supreme Court.

“Carlos was a hero, an icon, one of a kind, the way he led people nonviolently to make things happen,” said Manuel Flores, a former classmate at Texas A&I and now a department head at the school, since renamed Texas A&M-Kingsville.

Rick Casey, one of Guerra’s former colleagues at both the San Antonio Light and the Express-News, recalled how Guerra embraced the challenge of being one of the United States’ first Hispanic columnists.

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“He never tired of speaking for his people, who, when he came of age, had not much power and very little voice,” Casey said.

While Guerra once quipped, “I am bilingual and bicultural, and usually, by myself,” on Saturday night, he was in good and loving company.